skin stretched over it, is empty of music, but it has the quality of sowing its flat voice over many miles, threading through the voices of nature as a snake goes through grass. Simple variants in the rhythm of the strokes adapt it to messages, and now it was calling Paul. "Paul, Paul, P-P-Paul!" it thrilled, and its summons was as plain as words. To silence it, he put fingers to his mouth and answered with a shrill, rending whistle. The gourd was silent.

His mother was in the doorway as he came through the kraals; she heard his steps and called to him.

"Paul! That you? Where you bin all this time?"

"By the dam," he answered.

"I been callin' you this half hour," she said. "Mrs. Jakes is here—she wants you."

The light from within the house showed her as a thin woman, with the shape of youth yet upon her. But the years had taken tribute of her freshness, and her small, rather vacant face was worn and faded. She wore her hair coiled upon her head in a way to frame the thin oval of the face, and there remained to her yet the slight prettiness of sharp weak gestures and little conscious attitudes. In her voice there survived the clipped accent of London; Paul had come to know it as the thing that distinguished his mother from other women. Before her marriage she had been an actress of the obscure sort to be found in the lesser touring companies, and it was when the enterprise of which she was a member had broken down at the town of Fereira that she met and married the Boer, Christian du Preez, Paul's father. She preserved from the old days a stock of photographs inscribed in dashing hands—"yours to the dregs"—"your old pal"—"yours ever most sincerely"—and so on a few cuttings from newspapers—"Miss Vivie Sinclair as Gertie Gottem was most unique," said the Dopfontein Courant—a touch of raucousness in her voice, and a ceaseless weary longing for the easy sham life, the foolish cheerful companions, the stimulus of the daily publicity.

She drew the boy in, sliding her arm through his, to where Mrs. Jakes sat waiting.

"Here he is at last," she said, looking up at him prettily. She often said she was glad her boy was tall enough to go into a picture, but a mother must admire her son for one thing or another.

Mrs. Jakes acknowledged Paul's arrival with a lady-like little smile. "Better late than never," she pronounced.

She was the wife of the doctor at the Sanatorium, the old Dutch house that showed its steep roofs within a couple of miles of the farm, where came in twos and threes the consumptives from England, to mend their broken lungs in the clean air of the Karoo. They came not quite so frequently nowadays, for a few that returned healed, or believing themselves to be healed, had added to their travel-sketches of the wonderful old house and its surroundings an account of Dr. Jakes and his growing habit of withdrawing from his duties to devote himself to drink. Their tales commonly omitted to describe justly the anxious, lonely woman who labored at such times to supply his place, driving herself to contrive and arrange to keep the life of the house moving in its course, to maintain an assured countenance, and all the while to screen him from public shame and ruin. She was a wan little woman, clinging almost with desperation to those trivial mannerisms and fashions of speech which in certain worlds distinguished the lady from the mere person. She had lain of nights beside a drunken husband, she had fought with him when he would have gone out to make a show of his staggering gait and blurred speech—horrible silent battles in a candle-lit room, ending in a gasping fall and sickness—she had lied and cheated to hide the sorry truth, she had bared her soul in gratitude to her kind God that her child had died. These things as a matter of course, as women accept and belittle their martyrdom; but never in her life had she left the spoon standing in her tea-cup or mislaid her handkerchief. The true standards of her life were still inviolate.

She liked Paul because he was shy and gentle, but not well enough to talk to him without mentioning the weather first.

"The evenings are drawing out nicely," she remarked, leaning to one side in her chair to see through the door the darkness growing dense upon the veld. "It reminds me a little of a June evening in England—if only the rain holds off."

"Yes," said Paul. There would be rain in the ordinary course in three months or so, if all went well, but it was not worth while to go into the matter with Mrs. Jakes.

"We are to have another guest," the lady went on. The doctor's patients were always "guests" when she spoke of them. "A young lady this time. And that is what I came about, really."

"Mrs. Jakes wants you to go in to the station with the Cape-cart and fetch her out, Paul," explained his mother. "You 'll 'ave the first look at her. Mrs. Jakes takes her oath she is young."

Mrs. Jakes shuddered faintly, and looked at the floor.

"About twenty-six, I understand," she said. "About that." Her tone reproached Mrs. du Preez for a lapse of good manners. Mrs. Jakes did not understand the sprightliness of mild misstatement. She turned to Paul.

"If you could manage it," she suggested. "If it wouldn't be too much trouble! The doctor, I 'm sorry to say, has a touch of the sun; he is subject, you know." Her hands clasped nervously in her lap, and her face seemed blind as she beat bravely on. "The climate really does n't suit him at all; he can't stand the heat. I 've begged and prayed him to give it up and go back to private practice at home. But he considers it his duty to keep on."

"The morning train?" asked Paul.

"It is early," lamented Mrs. Jakes. "But we should be so much obliged."

Paul nodded. "All right," he said. "I will bring her, Mrs. Jakes."

There are transactions consecrated to the humorous point of view, landmarks in the history of laughter. Mrs. du Preez honestly believed that a youth and a girl alone in the dawn were a spectacle essentially mirthful.

"Catch him missing the chance," she said, with her slightly jarring laugh. "None of your larks, now, Paul! Promise you 'll behave!"

"Yes, mother," Paul promised gravely, and her face went blank before the clear eyes he turned upon her. Mrs. Jakes in her chair rustled her stiff dress in a wriggle of approval.

"Miss Harding is the name," she told Paul. "You 'll manage to find her? I don't know at all what she 's like, but she comes of a very good family, I believe. You can't mistake her."

"Paul knows the look of the lungy ones by now," Mrs. du Preez assured her. "Don't you, Paul? It 's lungs, of course, Mrs. Jakes?"

"Chest trouble," corrected Mrs. Jakes, nervously. She preferred the less exact phrase, for there is indelicacy in localising diseases, and from the lungs to the bowels it is but a step. "Chest trouble, a slight attack. Fortunately, Miss Harding is taking it in time. The doctor lays stress on the necessity for taking it in time."

"Well," said Mrs. du Preez, "whatever it is, she 'll 'ave the fashions. Lungs or liver, they 've got to dress, and it 'll be something to see a frock again. She 's from London, you said?"

Mrs.